I’m sorry, I really am, but I have so many comments... https://twitter.com/Digital_Cloud/status/1383602669227438086

Your personal right to own a semi-automatic weapon with a forty round capacity, and keep thousands of rounds of ammo in your house is not constitutionally protected either. The second amendment is clearly about militias.

The words “well regulated militia” are *right there.*

A recklessly, lawlessly armed populace is subject to the whims of it’s most paranoid, unbalanced members.

There is no mention of a right to protect yourself from criminals in the constitution.

Do you imagine yourself killing other human beings over your stash of canned beans and 40 inch TV set after a natural disaster? Why would you imagine that? Who installed this sick fantasy in your mind?

Where do criminals get guns? Do you think there is no connection between large numbers of guns in legal circulation and larger numbers of guns being available to criminals?

You can’t seriously be suggesting that the armed US *populace* has deterred invasions. And the armed US populace *improved* the chances of the last attempted coup. https://twitter.com/digital_cloud/status/1383613933303439370

As I noted obliquely in my first reply, there are many contemporary examples of countries which 1) do not have a heavily armed citizenry and 2) do not have particularly high crime rates. Many of them also score well on measures of political freedom and democracy.

Another thing about this one: I’m not a scholar of civil war history but I *think* the U.S. Army took up arms against the Confederates, not a bunch of dudes with their muskets from their mantle pieces. https://twitter.com/Digital_Cloud/status/1383613933303439370

An armed populace is also at the whims of a tyrannical government when the ones who can afford to be armed agree with the tyrant.

It just makes me sincerely sad that some people think being able to “defend a business from looters,” or to pretend they could do better than the original Wolverines in a reboot of Red Dawn, are good reasons to do nothing about a problem that kills nearly 40,000 people a year.

Returning to add a postscript, because this thread here contains an ... interesting note about the words in the Second Amendment. https://twitter.com/kurteichenwald/status/1385320848999944193